Designing a Reference Resolver That Survives Partial Outages
A reference resolver that assumes every target is reachable is a resolver that fails the first time a downstream server…
Author: Jacob Berkowitz
Health IT consultant in Boston. Writes about patient access APIs and the operational gap between FHIR specs and member experience.
Reference Resolution in Bulk Data: What the Spec Allows
Bulk Data delivers ndjson files that carry FHIR resources by the thousand. References between resources in those files cross ndjson…
Batching Resolution to Reduce Round Trips
A resolver that issues one GET per external reference is a resolver that will hit the network more than any…
Circular References and How to Detect Them Safely
A cycle in a FHIR reference graph is not always a bug. Some clinical scenarios legitimately produce them — a…
Version-Specific References: When You Need Them, When You Don't
A FHIR reference can point at a specific version of a resource by appending _history/N to the URL. That version-specific…
Reference Integrity in a Distributed FHIR Deployment
Reference integrity in a single-node FHIR server is a solved problem. Reference integrity across multiple servers, replicas, or federated stores…
Contained References vs External References: Cost and Safety
FHIR gives two ways to point one resource at another: contain it inside the parent, or reference it externally by…
Resolving FHIR References Without a Full Database Walk
Every non-trivial FHIR client eventually has to resolve references, and the naive resolver — one database read per reference —…
How to Author an SDC ExtractDefinition for a Multi-Answer PROMs Instrument
PROMs instruments are rarely single-answer. PROMIS-29 covers seven domains with four items each. PHQ-9 has nine items plus a computed…
CMS-0057-F Quarterly Reporting Requirements: What Payers Must Compute and Publish
Most of the CMS-0057-F conversation gets consumed by the four APIs and the SLAs that go with them. The quarterly…